In the 80s, the BBC was in constant trouble for its leftwing bias and then that all vanished, pfff! The corporation seemed to internalise such sensitivities, vowing to provide impartiality so complete it was weird. Of course, this is now only perceptible on Radio 4. On the tellybox, they don't have to take positions. They just dress Matt Lucas in a fat suit and shout: "Look over there!"

I can understand it on the Today programme, which is meant to be news. You don't want 5 Live's Richard Bacon popping up and saying to Ed Balls: "Nobody wants you to be CHANCELLOR. They want to know how their GRANNY'S going to get home from the SHOPS without being BLUDGEONED to DEATH."

But it reached ludicrous proportions recently with David Hare's Wall, a rumination on the Israel-Palestine divide. It was a polemic. But rather than accept that they would just broadcast something that was not fair-minded and impartial (with an understanding among civilised people that a counter-argument would come along, at similar length, some other time), they had to get Benny Morris, professor of history at Ben-Gurion University, on to the World Tonight to defend the actual wall.

Never mind that his defence was stupid ("Incidentally," he said, "it's not really a wall - it's only about 7% wall and 93% fence"); the whole thing was so contrived. The World Tonight is a news programme, and this wasn't news. Then they had to squish the whole business into Sunday night's Feedback. This excellent programme is too often swamped by ersatz controversies that shouldn't be controversial at all - not if we can all understand that an intelligent broadcaster, gathering serious minds into one place, is bound to end up with some opinions.

I wish they would stop self-censoring and wait for the complaints. It's all hot air anyway: the people who threaten not to pay their licence fee are the same people who have to pay the fee, in perpetuity, because they'll never work out how to watch TV on the internet.